This is great. As a University of Minnesota graduate I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for gopher. Even in 2010 I remember we had some old gopher documentation floating around the IT department. Here's a summary[1] of its history.

Because of this post, I've spent the last few hours re-exploring gopher spaces on sdf.org. Half that time was spent reading xmanmonk's "What The...?" phlog from the start. I have no clue if they're real or just stories, but either way, they're great reads.

Time to write one! They are fun little coding projects (I've written three, one in Lua, one in Python/Tkinter, and one in Golang). A lot of the people in the shell communities I am a part of (all of which offer Gopher hosting) roll their own. The protocol is just so simple and easy to work with. :)

Isn't this "everything that's new is bad, let's get back to old days" rather tiresome?

Not trying to be the hater here. I'd just like to know what's so appealing about stuff where all the improvements we've had since the 80s aren't noticeable, like HiDPI displays, easy access to embedded 4k HDR video without requiring stuff like Flash or Silverlight.